Category: Silicon Labs

Silicon Labs demonstrates their latest Internet of Things devices including their Dynamic Multiprotocol support based on their Mighty Gecko ARM Cortex-M4 platform supporting Zigbee and Bluetooth in parallel running Micrium RTOS with just a few microsecond delay when switching. Micrium RTOS is the number 1 in the commercial RTOS market. Silicon Labs also shows their Bluetooth 5 support, voice over Bluetooth LE, sensor to cloud connectivity, apple homekit, Bluetooth 5 can do 4 times longer distance or 2 times more bandwidth compared with Bluetooth 4. Silicon Labs shows their Bluetooth Mesh system using their Mighty Gecko development board that also features a memory LCD display. Silicon Labs acquired Sigma Designs Z-Wave Business, where Z-Wave goes into sub-Ghz so there is less noise going through walls, reaching longer distances compared with Bluetooth and Zigbee and also able to make it a Mesh. They now have the 500 series chip and they are going to announce the 700 series ARM Cortex-M4 chip running at lower power providing a longer range. Silicon Labs has shipped hundreds of millions of devices thus far based on their Mighty Gecko, Bluetooth, and Zigbee products and they also have shipped over 100 million devices using Z-Wave.

Silicon Labs Blue Gecko Bluetooth Smart Module Wireless Starter Kit for BGM121 and BGM123 SiP modules and BGM111 module are Silicon Labs development boards to start evaluation and development of Bluetooth Smart applications for IoT. The wireless starter kit comes with the Bluetooth Smart module radio board, a main board with coin-cell battery holder, USB and Ethernet connections, display and connections to all the modules peripheral interfaces as well an extension board with additional peripherals like an accelerometer. The solution now support up to Bluetooth 5.0.

Silicon Labs, a US-based silicon, software and IoT developer, has demoed here their Flex Gecko 32-bit wireless multi-protocol SoC that runs on ARM's mbed platform. It has support for 2.4GHz frequency band and 6LoWPAN, allowing for transmission over IEEE 802.15.4. It can also support Bluetooth Low Energy specification. The MCU can use ARM Cortex-M3 or M4 for processing. If you have a license for white band or sub Ghz band then it can also be configured to send and receive the data at 600Mhz and 700Mhz. It can work with a power as high as 20 dBm.

ARM Cortex-M23 and Cortex-M33 are the first embedded processors based on the ARMv8-M architecture, bringing the proven secure foundation of ARM TrustZone to the most constrained IoT nodes. The majority of the top ten global MCU suppliers have already licensed one or both processors. Lead partners include Analog Devices, Microchip, Nuvoton, NXP, Renesas, Silicon Labs and STMicroelectronics.

The highly versatile Cortex-M33 features configuration options including a coprocessor interface, DSP and floating point computation, with increased performance and efficiency relative to Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M4. The Cortex-M23 takes security to the most constrained devices, building on the standard set by Cortex-M0+ as an ultra-low power microprocessor in a tiny footprint
The new Cortex-M processors are backwards compatible with ARMv6-M and ARMv7-M architectures for direct and fast porting, accelerating product development. TrustZone CryptoCell-312 fortifies the SoC with a rich set of security features protecting the authenticity, integrity and confidentiality of code and data.

ARM shows their open source hardware and software Smartwatch reference design with 2 months battery life runs mbed OS on a Silicon Labs EFM32 Giant Gecko ARM Cortex-M3 SoC and memory LCD, it also have an ARM Cortex-M0 for Bluetooth and an ARM Cortex-M4 for the fingerprint sensor. GPS, NFC, 9-axis sensor (accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer), ambient light sensor, capacitive sliders for UI scrolling, buttons and more are on the flexible PCB. The power consumption is around 70microAmps with the animation running on the memory LCD, the battery life should be about 2 month on a compact and light 160mAh battery. ARM is building open source experimental smart wearables to explore the potential of ARM in wearables and IoT, to encourage device makers to use all the latest ARM technologies in combination with innovative display technologies and sensors to to create better concepts, to better use technologies to try to contribute to and improve the internet of things and the wearables market. Some goals for better Wearables can be to last months on a battery, to connect and interact with all devices seamlessly, to enable new forms of trusted interactions and ultimately aim to fade in to the background. These advances are to be integrated into ARM's open source mbed OS, there might be subsets of mbed OS, less is needed on the Bluetooth chip for example than on the microcontroller of the Smartwatch or other IoT device.

Developing this mbed OS Smartwatch reference design gives ARM the opportunity to get first-hand experience of the realities of building complete and complex physical products - the mechanical design, electronics, software and taking it all through the production process. ARM has taken a complete design from concept through to manufacturing a few hundred working units thus far, and learned a huge amount. This may inspire and encourage device makers to advance and innovate faster to make the Smartwatch market a success.